Project 365.235 – Wicker

To be perfectly honest, I have no idea where exactly this chair came from. My parents must have got it at some point and left it literally rotting in the shed. It’s on the driveway now, and looks very ‘thrown out’.

Wan Hu’s Flying Chair by Richard Marggraf Turley, Review by Alexicon

Wan Hu’s Flying Chair is an anthology along the same strain for me as Your Brother’s Blood by David Towsey. Having said that, it does not feature any wild-west vistas or undead soldiers, it is only related by the profession of the authors, who are both tutors at Aberystwyth University. This is Richard Marggraf Turley’s third published collection of poetry after Whiteout, co-authored with Damian Walford Davies and The Fossil Box, his first solo project.

It stands to reason therefore that this collection should be a strong example of poetry from a seasoned poet. And it certainly lives up to expectations. The collection as a whole weaves its way through several themes from the exotic to the arts and delves into the cultures of Caribbean islands and ancient China. There is a natural sense of the exotic intertwined with astrology and science. Wan Hu, was a Chinese official who is said to have been the first astronaut. He crafted a chair and attached forty-seven rockets to it in the hope of visiting the moon. The story has been discredited as apocryphal, but the ideas it brings forth make for an interesting and unusual collection.

Margraff Turley’s use of language was a feat in itself. The way the words fall onto the page brings each poem to life in an almost sensual way. The language plays with you. Every single word knows its quarter and the structure of each poem is meticulous. One line which particularly stuck in my mind was in the section ‘Life Classes’ in the poem ‘Female Nude with a Mask’ where the word manipulation is cleverly split with a hyphen, leaving us with the line “torso of a man-“ followed by “ipulation” of light at the start of the following stanza. This trick with hyphens, which jars your reading slightly and deliberately was an extremely effective technique early in the book, but perhaps used to less great effect in the later half.

I do feel that the first half is the stronger half, though some of the sequences were very interesting and there were imaginative phrases all the way through. The way he writes about the natural world is exceptional and certain poems really stuck in my mind. ‘Seventh Moon,’ ‘Billiard Ball’ and ‘Beach’ were particularly good to read, but my personal favourite was ‘Islands,’ dedicated to his former co-author Damian Walford Davies with its wonderful final two lines.

“Let’s ride to the Pineapple Islands.

Perhaps there’ll be pineapple people.”

Wan Hu’s Flying Chair is available on Amazon.co.uk from £8.59